Bangaw Shades

When you look at a person, you are looking at a hundred more fellows dwelling inside him. That is my attempt to encapsulate Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory in sixteen words.

This psychological theory, the psychological theory, has become the most influential, not to mention most controversial, theory for shrinks all over the world in the past century. It is not its mere validity that made it prominent. Rather, it is its uniqueness and audacity that made it the chief theory in psychology, the one that all psychologists should first understand before any other mumbo-jumbo claiming to explain human behavior and mental processes.

Defy everything and be good at it and you will have your name emblazoned in history. Freud, via his theory, did it in two ways. His unearthing of the unconscious is the first, and his conception of Libido Theory is the second.

The Unconscious

Let me start by saying that this “thing” existed inside man since his creation, and possibly even in other beings that existed before him. As I always say in my lectures, it is comprised of the elements of our minds that we cannot access without the use of psychoanalytic techniques exercised by an expert psychologist. So why is it a big deal if it is inaccessible anyway? Okay here's the deal. The unconscious is a tumultuous aggregate of man's most potent motives. What's inside it steers every single act in his repertoire of behavior, from daily post-lunch-break chain-smoking to the creation of the atom bomb.

As a student of Freud, it seems to me that this unconscious is the holy grail of psychology since it can potentially explain all of human behavior and mental processes. The problem-a really big one-is that it is inaccessible. Freud just gave mankind utter bad news, big time, by claiming that the causes of his acts and thinking are unknowable. In other words, we have always been (and will always be) slaves of a primitive dictator residing inside our minds, the existence of whom is unknown to all who haven't heard about psychoanalytic theory, including all those who lived before Freud.

All of a sudden man is facing a dead end, a stoic white wall where “you are destined (doomed, is more like it) to be ignorant of your nature forever” is written in sinister red paint. This leaves man dumbstruck and insecure. However, Freud left a little silver lining just enough to rouse the appetite for challenges in his successors. For instance he said that dreams and slips-of-the-tongue, referred to as Freudian slip in psychoanalytic jargon, can give us clues as to what's inside our unconscious. In addition, in the hands of a master psychoanalyst, cryptic and notorious motives can be exhumed from the cobwebbed unconscious. Nevertheless, even with these means, the pilgrimage towards the valley of the unconscious remains as torturous as finding a needle in a haystack.

Now that we know what the deal with the unconscious is, let me add a couple more vexing premises into our already vexing state of affairs. Most elements that comprise the unconscious are socially unacceptable urges. This is the first premise. The two most powerful among these are aggression and sex. Put in another way, Freud is saying that we are predominantly aggressive and sexual beings. More precisely, he is saying that we are primarily sexual beings and secondarily aggressive ones. This is the second premise, which is crystallized in his Libido Theory. This theory asserts that sexual urge is the most important determinant of human behavior. Yes, you read it right.

By theorizing about the contents of the unconscious, Freud enlightened us about our nature a little more. He made man less ignorant and insecure, by revealing the nature of the unconscious, but nonetheless, more malevolent and immoral this time around. He solves one dilemma but purports another.

Is being a primarily sexual individual deplorable? Perhaps it is in the context of most societal norms. But from the perspective of the newly born infant, still in its pristine state and untainted by the laws of society, his sexual instinct is perfectly normal, devoid of malice, and healthy. The urge is as innocent as the urge to eat when hungry or the desire to drink when parched. It is essential for the propagation of the species. The moral dilemma on man's sexual urge enters the fray only upon assimilation of the societal code of ethics, like those learned from one's religion for instance, into his personal belief system.

It is in this light that Freud wants us to view sex. It is through this naïve, objective, and scientific lens that he intends us to regard Libido Theory. Taking a second look at the historical landscape, it appears it was society that incorporated malice into man's concept of sex and sexuality. The newly born organism would be boggled with the thought that sex is taboo just as much as we would be perplexed at the thought that gobbling Macdo fries, especially when hungry, is obscene. Whenever we get uncomfortable with the ubiquitous sexual innuendos in Psychoanalytic Theory, perhaps it is us who are being malicious, not Freud and definitely not his object of study-man. Only when we hold back our knee-jerk value judgment on sex and sexuality will we fathom Freud's brainchild-of-a-theory. Only then will we discover its secrets.